Skip to main content

harry potter - Why does Newt say Lumos Maxima in the Fantastic Beasts trailer?


At the beginning of the trailer for Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, someone (who I think is Newt Scamander) says the spell "Lumos Maxima". The problem is that Lumos Maxima is not a canon spell. The spell that everyone uses in the books is Lumos. (Rowling has said "That's showbiz!" when asked about the movies versions of the spells.)


A fact that further complicated matters is that JKR said on Twitter that she "wrote the entire script".


So why does Fantastic Beasts have Lumos Maxima?


(An out of universe answer is fine, I'm more of trying to figure out where this movie stands canonwise than trying to mesh two incompatible things.)



Answer



As per OP's request I turned my comments into an answer, despite them being somwhat speculative.


The film series is of course an entirely seperate continuity from that of the books, and JKR was always okay with it being this way (films over there, books over here), her "That's showbiz!" comment can be intrepreted the same way.



Just like the books - and any franchise, really - the films try to establish their own continuity by repeating themes (particularly with the score / the music, which despite having been created by different composers, still kept central themes throughout).


This is done to interconnect each new installment with those that came before it and (hopefully) will come after.


Either the screenwriter incorporates those "threads" in his/her script from the start, or is asked to include them later.


Because since the early moments of the third film, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban it has been established that within the canon of the film franchise Lumos Maxima exists, its inclusion in other installments simply uses that established fact.


In her book canon, JKR has never mentioned Lumos Maxima, so it's actually unknown whether it does exist there or not (she could after all very well write another book and establish it as book canon, the unlikelyness of that notwithstanding, since if that powerful a light could be produced someone in the previous books should have used it in a time of need).


Since we have not (yet) seen any script draft, nor the shooting script, nor a transcript, we do not know if she wrote Lumos Maxima into it.


Like all scriptwriters, she will have to live with the fact, that what was written is rarely that which appears on the screen later. The reasons for this are numerous, for instance




  • actors might chance things to make it feel "more natural for the character" (which the author of course created, usually for a reason, but alas);





  • the director,




  • the producer(s) (which in this case JKR is one as well, so maybe this influence may have been not as prominent, although Steve Kloves is also a producer - and a professional screenwriter - and since writing for the page differs from writing for film there were probably discussions there as well)




  • and most of all the studio give notes upon notes upon notes.





Particularly the last one applies in this case. WB are interested in keeping the interconnection within their franchise alive, so if they said "Put a Maxima in here", it went in.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

languages - Do we ever see written English in the Star Wars films?

In Empire Strikes Back , we see a transcription of what R2's beeps and bloops mean, but it's not English (sorry for the low quality, it's from the 2004 DVDs): I'd assume it's what Basic looks like when written, but is there some point in the the Star Wars films we see written English instead? (This sort of spun off from a discussion in How do people understand astromech droids? .) Answer At one point there was English but it has been phased out in subsequent versions of the films. Chris Gould at DVD Active did a comparison of all versions of each of the Star Wars films, and in his comparison of Episode 4 , there are a couple of screenshots showing how the power gauge for the Death Star tractor beam was changed. I imagine there are probably more to be found in his other comparisons but I haven't got around to reading those yet.

Was the "pure soul" of Harry's what had really hurt Voldemort?

In the Order of the Phoenix, Voldemort possesses Harry, and it hurts. Greatly. I think that Dumbledore explained that it was because Voldemort's rotten soul was incapable of assimilating Harry's pure soul, that Voldemort didn't understand the love and friendship etc that Harry has in his heart. But, I think it was a lie. Remember that in Deathly Hallows, while looking for information regarding Horcruxes, it is discovered that it is in fact possible to merge a soul fragment back, but that the process was extremely painful. Now then, if Voldemort tried to possess Harry, and Harry had a fragment of Voldemort's soul, I think that it could have been the true cause of Voldemort's pain: the fact of having his soul so close of another fragment. I think that Dumbledore knew that fact, but had to lie to Harry because it was inappropriate to let him know that he had one of Voldemort's soul fragments at the moment. Is that right? Or was it truly the pure soul of Harry's...

star wars - What "exactly" happens when someone turns to the Dark Side?

When I saw the original Star Wars saga as a kid, the concept of the Dark Side imprinted in me was quite simple. You did a bad thing, so you're a bad person so you go to the Dark Side and keep doing bad things. Now, obviously this doesn't hold true in reality. In my mind it is perfectly reasonable for Luke to kill the Emperor and Vader and then just flee the Death Star and rejoin the Alliance. After all they are at war, those are enemy officers that have captured him and are taunting him by threatening with death of all loved ones and the whole operation was intended to kill the Emperor anyway. The same would hold true for Anakin. He could have killed Mace Windu to save the Chancellor and Padme but that doesn't mean he's going to then go mad and kill all Jedis including children. It doesn't add up from a merely psychological point of view. He had a set of objectives and that made him want to keep the Chancellor alive (quite valid by the way, Mace Windu is quite clums...

star trek - Warning regarding forward saucer section in Nemesis?

In Star Trek: Nemesis , just before the Enterprise rams into the Scimitar, Picard sends a text message from his captain's chair arm pad to Troi — who is manning the helm in lieu of the crewman who was just blown out through what was once the view screen — indicating that she should put full impulse on standby. (Literally, if you watch the scene closely, Troi's console prefaces the order with "TXT MSG" !) My question is: Did Picard also somehow warn crew members in the forward saucer section about what was about to happen? The ramming of the Scimitar was a heat of the moment decision. Considering that he also resorted to calling the auto-destruct sequence shortly after (which ended up being offline), he probably was of the mindset that any losses would be acceptable in order to hault Shinzon's march to Earth. Still, I'm curious. Answer The original script indicates that he called for the crew to " brace for impact ". Whether that call (or the comma...